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History often resembles “Myth,” because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.

— J. R. R. Tolkien

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Jordan Peterson seems to understand “memes” better than the man who coined the term. The two made this clear in their “debate,” which saw Peterson enthusiastically struggle to penetrate the thick modernist, materialist glaze over Richard Dawkins’ eyes. The persistent relevance of their discussion, and even its occurrence in the first place, is testament to its status as a milestone of the current upheaval and reversal in the Meaning Crisis, aptly dubbed the “Counter-Enlightenment.” Peterson, parroting Jung, as ever, believes the deeper abstraction of Dawkins’ concept is essentially the “archetype.” What their conversation uncovered for me was seemingly that what Jung and Joseph Campbell and the modern comparative-religion-esque stream gets right is that there are features of the myths by which we explain the world that are inescapable, and Darwinism is no exception to this captivity.

Richard Dawkins and his ilk don’t seem to understand that their view of the world is, while materialist, still mythological. It has been theorized that the bones of megafauna in the region of Greece inspired myths of creatures like the cyclopes. Just as the thief thinks everyone steals, the modern assumes everyone conducts science. What this theory actually reveals is that the project of modern science fails to escape the patterns of archaic imagination. Didn’t the Greeks, ultimately, arrive at the same fundamental conclusions of Darwinian paleontology? That the world was once full of giant monsters, but humanity somehow paved the way over them, whether with assistance from Olympians or from natural means?

 Like many, if not most, American boys, I went through a spell of fascination with dinosaurs. I had toys and books, I knew their names, and I knew, scientifically, that spinosaurus was the coolest one. Despite the disagreements little boys might have about the facts of which dinosaur was the most powerful, the most deadly, or the most fun to doodle in the margins of spiral-bound notebooks, every little boy knows what the world of dinosaurs looked like (at least, they did in my childhood, inarguably the best time to be a child, of course). The modern age has made the setting of tropical plants, volcanic activity, and hulking, alien creatures ubiquitous. What little boys call “dinosaur times,” variously described by modern eggheads who don’t really know what dinosaurs are as cretaceous, jurassic, etc., is imbued with ancient tropes (Consider the five suns of Aztec myth). The primordial world of Darwinism is key to understanding Darwinism as a mythology.

There’s a sound psychological reason why more fundamentalist creationists of the “Answers in Genesis” variety tend to think of dinosaurs as antediluvian. It’s because, mythologically, they are. The biblical text of the flood chronology contains no shortage of mystery, but Genesis 6 is clear that the “nephilim were on the earth in those days,” whatever that means. The antediluvian setting is colored with vestigial primordiality — a time of ancient men, great violence and extinct beings, before the world that was made fully resembled the world order that now is. So the prehistoric world of an evolutionary myth is as well. (As an example, perhaps the “caveman” trope is something of an analog culturally to nephilim, both being ancient pseudo-human races understood to possess great stature or strength.) Again, this is clearly manifested psychologically in the truncation of cavemen, giant bugs, dinosaurs, ice ages and all sorts of creatures and phenomena supposed to be separated by unfathomable millennia into one profoundly foreshortened era of prehistory in the popular imagination (Consider the recent Genndy Tartakovsky project Primal). 

The same conflation takes place in the mind of the aforementioned breed of creationists who perhaps have some reservations about leaving the trappings of modernity behind. Such will often propound the notion, in an effort to reconcile their modern and pre-modern values, that a meteor did not kill the dinosaurs, nor did the Ice Age, but the Flood. This is because the Great Flood and the meteor are cut from the same cloth. Both fit the bill of the same archetypal prehistoric cataclysm which wipes away the old and ushers in the present, though in the secular myth, it is the wrath of a cold uncaring universe that kills the vicious and violent primordial order and the benevolence of sheer coincidence — or brute selection pressure — that calls the survivors out of the Ark. The story of evolution, which is indeed, crucially, a story, functions as a mythology. It is not just an account of how things happened, but one of what things really mean (See the Scopes “Monkey Trial”). 

The meaning of the evolution myth, at least within its secular religion, is that it is not the wrath of a righteous God that cleanses the face of the earth, but random, undirected cosmic fire, purging not the wicked but simply the weak and unfortunate. It is not the mercy of a loving God that spares our progenitors, but the indifference of the natural world and the sheer strength and survival fitness of the lucky few. To be sure, more than just the Ken Ham types can and will find ways to reconcile the bare facts of the story to the myth of the Genesis narrative, but this effort validates the thesis that the two are, by default, at odds with one another, at least in their cultural instantiation. The propositions of evolutionary theory do not inherently conflict with the Genesis myth, in my opinion, but it is telling that the majority of both secular and religious people have assumed battle lines suggesting that they do and that either Genesis must be torn down to make room for Darwin or vice versa. It is understood, correctly or not, by both sides that these two stories are fundamentally vying for the same position.

And are they not? Part of the difficulty in saying so is that, by its very modern character, the evolutionary myth tends to conflate the “how” and “why” of life’s origin. A pure Darwinist believes that the answer to the age-old, universal question of, “Why do I exist?” can only be answered to the degree of how one exists. Anything that speculates beyond that is unscientific and therefore inadmissible. This paradigm is (erroneously) adopted by certain literalist creationists who insist that Genesis explains why humanity exists primarily, fundamentally, and even exclusively by explaining how humanity came to exist. The “how” question is certainly material to the case, but it is not identical to the question of “why.” To assume identity between the two is to erase or ignore the teleological significance of the origin myth.

Myths are stories, and stories need a beginning and an end, which inevitably characterize the middle. The teleological danger of secular evolutionism is profound. I’ve been chewing on a historical progression that explains the development of the secular myth’s end, going from Augustine’s City of God, a biblically eschatological ending to the story, to Hegel’s “end of history,” which figuratively brings Augustine’s City to earth prematurely, to Darwin’s evolution, which has an end like a mathematical asymptote, always approached but never reached. Darwin recaptures the eternity of Augustine but makes it pedestrian like Hegel. Darwin finds eternity in the finite, infinity in the endlessness of cyclical nature. 

Now, I should disclaim that I am using Darwin as representative rather than literally speaking of him as an individual. I don’t know what Darwin’s utopian “end of history” looked like, or if it was even utopian at all. Given that his systematic view of the world depends on perpetual death and competition, I doubt utopia even factored into his view. Evolution may not be a game that anyone can win, it simply ends if every player is eliminated. Others would disagree, especially among the transhumanist crowd. Here lurk more dangerous teleologies than that of empty, endless, purposeless and perpetual evolution.

Transhumanism posits that evolution is in fact a game that can be won, and that humans will win when we escape the game once and for all, by transcending the animalian limits of human form and overcome death. On an evolutionary view, technology (to the cognitive discomfort, I’m sure, of many secular environmentalists) is itself merely natural, a simple extension of the pinnacle of evolutionary progress. The greatest survival advantage of humans is our cooperative power of cognition (Genesis 11:6) that enables us to use our environment to do more than our bodies ever could on their own. It stands to reason on an evolutionary view, then, that eventually this power could evolve to overcome every imaginable limitation on human flesh, especially mortality. But mortality is the defining parameter of evolution, so to eradicate it would be to usher in a new, eternal era unseen in the cosmos, to play a different game (notwithstanding the problem that entropy poses to immortal creatures, but I’m sure the most thoughtful transhumanists have posited pie-in-the-sky solutions for this as well).

The commonality between this view and the Christian story becomes unignorable, basically because both are driven by the compound problem of death and pain. Both have as their end the eternal, immortal, immaterial existence of euphoria and peace from the rat race of survival. A key distinctive of the Christian view, though, is holiness. The euphoria of the City of God is that of unification with the divine in a moral sense, hence the gospel’s rectification of the death problem is predicated first on the propitiation for the sin problem. Transhuman evolution faces no such moral obstacle. The price of technological, biological immortality is not atonement but progress. It is strictly an amoral “gospel.” 

Instead of the righteous dying for the unrighteous and rising again so that the unworthy may ascend, the weak die for the strong so that the worthy (fit) might ascend. There is no agency in the transhuman myth, but merely inevitability, not divine predestination or preordination, but only natural fatalism. The flavor of the secular, naturalist “glorification” of the human form varies among solutions in biology, AI, digital consciousness, and more, I’m sure. It’s the City of God replaced with the Tower of Babel, to draw again on Genesis mythology. It’s about mankind, through the aforementioned powers of cognition, wresting control of the cosmos and the self to “reach heaven,” to break through all delineations, to escape the bounds of good and evil, life and death, mind and matter, heaven and earth. It’s a theosis in which the goal is self-referential, not an external deity but an unrealized potential within man. It’s a perverse beatific vision of realizing self rather than beholding the Trinity.

This is not the only mythological possibility of evolution, probably because, as stated, evolutionary theory does not try to offer classically mythological explanations. It does so of necessity rather than of intent. All stories have an end, and so do all myths. Sometimes the ending of the evolution myth is extinction (Great Filter theory), sometimes it’s ascension (transhumanism), sometimes it resembles an eastern, even pantheist cosmology (universal oscillation, multiverse). In any case, each of these stories has an end, not just chronologically, but teleologically. The work of Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning posits that cognition of necessity and by nature demands purpose. Therefore, every story also has a God or gods. 

This is what Richard Dawkins fails to understand about his own view of the world. This is why he can devote his entire career to calling theists deluded and insane and then call himself “culturally Christian.” There is resounding dissonance between what he thinks and what he thinks he thinks. He thinks that his brand of evolution and the atheism it entails are simply brute facts, which is why in his discussions with Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali he cannot bring himself to ask any questions except, “Did the virgin birth really happen?” To Dawkins, how things happened and why they happened are the same answer. As he’s admitted himself, if some sort of divine apparition or voice from heaven appeared to him, he would seek a naturalistic explanation. The reason for such an occurrence, to Dawkins, would be no different than the mechanism. The fMRI explaining the neurochemistry of hallucination would absolve him of any concerns of real divine intervention. A forensic biological investigation would dispel any suggestion that the virgin birth was divine.

It is clear from his discussion with Peterson that this also applies to Scripture. The inability of the two to resolve the question of whether the Bible is produced by historic processes or divine inspiration betrays this conflation of “how” and “why.” Working backwards through Darwin to return to Hegel along the suggested route of thinking, Hegel certainly thought that the working of history and the spirations of God were not only compatible, but that the former fully embodied the latter. The paradox of the incarnate Word is present in the written Word as well. The Scriptures are God’s breath from men’s throats, the ruach of the Divine in the nephesh of the writers. They are, in some inexplicable way, the product of man and God, though perhaps not to equal degree or in like manner. The mechanism of their production may reveal but is not identical to their origin, intent and purpose.

Evolution may explain how things have happened, but that does not necessarily explain why they have happened. Hence, various theories sprout in the soil of Darwinism to pick up this slack. Evolution sits in the seat of myth, but it doesn’t put in the work — it assumes the throne but not the scepter. This makes men like Dawkins blind to the weeds of philosophy growing in his materialist, atheist, scientistic garden. The conversation between Peterson and Dawkins was so difficult because Richard Dawkins does not know what he believes, he only knows what propositions he accepts. He knows nothing of faith, of the axioms it imports, and therefore seems to accept as axiomatic that he accepts no axioms. Because of this, Dawkins thinks that he thinks dragons aren’t real, but he knows that they are, even biologically. I’ve seen some young-earthers (apparently collateral victims, not the target in this article) try to get this point across the aisle with pseudo-scientific explanations, but these are often silly and always profoundly unnecessary. Science doesn’t tell us dragons are real, we know it anyway. Premodern people didn’t need biology or paleontology (the silliest science) to believe it, so why should we?

All of this is important because, as I have said and will continue to say, human beings by our nature see the world through story. Evolution, despite many moderns’ opinion that facts and myths are opposites, does not escape the fact of myth. Giant animals are mythical giants, Pangaea is Tiamat, dinosaurs are Titans, tyrannosaurus is a dragon, spinosaurus is leviathan, mammoth is behemoth, cavemen are nephilim, meteors are Zeus’ thunderbolts, the Ice Age is the flood, perhaps. These are all speculative comparisons, and their referents are not all identically analogous, but they establish the point nonetheless: we all believe in myths, we all believe in grand cosmic stories (metanarratives) that unite the little stories that happen within their confines because we have no choice. If we know this, we can make the choice of what stories we believe more wisely.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. — Proverbs 3:5 (KJV)

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. … He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. — Job 40:15, 19 (KJV)

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. — Genesis 6:4 (KJV)